Wednesday, 5 March 2014

New Online Tool For Archiving Facebook Pages

Last month, I wrote about how Facebook was deleting large numbers of Facebook pages relating to the conflict in Syria, in many cases as a result of targeted campaigns by pro-government groups against specific pages. As a result, large amounts of information about the conflict was being lost, and my own survey discovered that included the majority of pages posting initial reports on the August 21st Sarin attack in Damascus.

As a response to this, a new site has been launched that hopes to preserve this information by archiving Facebook pages. Alghayma, meaning “The Cloud” in Arabic, is the creation Frederic Jacobs and Batikh Souri, and their hope is to not only archive Facebook pages, but also turn them into more usable information. That includes developing improved search functions, a torrent of the entire archive, and many other functions as the project progresses.

Users can support the project by authorising the Facebook app, that allows more requests from Alghayma to the Facebook servers, allowing pages to be archived more frequently, and anyone can add pages or search for pages already archived here.